How LeBron's Move Helps the Tea Party

So LeBron James is abandoning Cleveland for sunny Miami. That's a
tough break for Ohio sports fans. But what effect might LeBron's departure
have on Ohio's politics? I think it helps the Tea Party, for reasons
I'll lay out.

First, let's stipulate that reading any kind of meaning
into a celebrity sports event is by its very nature pretty ridiculous,
more like fortune-telling than the rigorous political
analysis you've come to expect from The Atlantic. But I have to justify
spending all afternoon watching ESPN and reading Bill Simmons (and gawking at models). So
here goes.

I've spent the week traveling around Texas,
particularly the Gulf area southeast of Houston, whose residents have
been hit hard by the offshore drilling moratorium, the end of the Space
Shuttle, and its successor program, Constellation. At the Fourth of July
parade I attended in Friendswood, near the Johnson Space Center, the
economic dislocation was palpable. Everybody worried that jobs were
leaving and not coming back, so their kids would leave, too. NASA's
decline in particular--Obama's space policy would end the agency's
manned flights, a source of tremendous local pride--was upsetting to
everyone, because the whole area was about to lose its identity.

There
were four tents on the parade concourse with political themes:
Republican, Democrat, Tea Party, and Glenn Beck's 9-12 outfit. The first
two were nearly empty; the latter two were jammed with people, so I
hung out there talking to them. They were angry about a lot of stuff,
but the unifying theme was their feeling that they were on the losing end of things,
and to hell with the system that had put them there.

Back to
Ohio. The unemployment rate is well above the national average, nearly
11 percent. The state's manufacturing base has been decimated, and those
jobs aren't coming back. And now, suddenly, the biggest star in the state -- an economic engine in his own right, and a guy who probably
single-handedly made Cleveland a recognizable sports mecca all over the
world -- has forsaken its residents. And not just forsaken them, but
utterly humiliated themby forsaking them on a globally televised ESPN
Special!

Would you be angry? I sure would be. And I'd be that
much more amenable to the Tea Party message that everything is going to
hell.

UPDATE: Cleveland's so pissed they might set their river back on fire. Is there a Sharron Angle of the Buckeye State?